


The Prize

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-13
Updated: 2012-04-13
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is bad at accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, and Peggy and Steve are in a garden.  <i>"This my book of agents that I never caught."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prize

**Author's Note:**

> First posted to [tumblr](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/20989836445/on-the-way-back-from-a-thoroughly-embarrassing) on 4/12/2012. 
> 
> Inspired by this picture from the May issue of Vogue: 
> 
>  

On the way back from a thoroughly embarrassing trip to Stockholm for the Peace Prize, seriously, the Peace Prize, and what they had to do to keep Stark from commandeering the mike and just let Coulson speak for all of them — Steve stops by Peggy’s cottage in the country. It’s late spring. She is in retirement; she has been in retirment for almost twenty-five years. It isn’t Steve’s first visit, and since the sun is out, he knows to find her in the garden, propped up on a lawn chair, wrapped in blankets and half-asleep. The rich brown hair has gone white; she has difficulty walking, and her appetite is down to nothing. 

But she wakes when Steve sits down. Her attendant brings out a tray with tea; Steve talks to her a little, and after a while, she tells the attendant to bring out the binder on her desk in her study. He does; it’s thick, leather-bound, gold stitching down the sides. Is this her family? Steve knows she married, got on with her life, had children, had a life, and Steve has seen a few pictures in the house, but Peggy likes spending time outdoors as much as she can. 

The attendant puts the binder down in front of Steve, then slips away. 

“Have I ever shown you this?” Peggy says. 

Steve shakes his head and opens it — some personal pictures, but not family ones. Different-shaped faces, places that are clearly not vacations. A few press clippings. 

“Keep going,” Peggy says. Her voice is rough; she smoked for five decades before giving it up on retirement. ”Keep going — that one.” 

It’s color clipping from a glamor magazine, a little faded with time. A beautiful blonde in a peach-colored gown is coming out of hotel doors; she has a jaguar on a leash. A dark-haired man in a tuxedo looks appreciatively at her.

“From the film festival in Cannes, May 17, 1965.” Peggy says. Steve studies the picture, then looks back at her. 

“Good memory,” he says. 

She snorts. ”I remember it because I spent three years, cultivating a senior diplomat from one of those satellite nations with knowledge of the advanced missile work, had him just on this side of giving me the good stuff, and — ” She sighs, still angry about it all these years later. 

“You don’t recognize them, Steve? She dyed her hair blonde, but the Red Room kept her from aging a day. It’s your Natasha, who just won the Peace Prize, on her way to kill a man in a hotel bathroom. Classic Soviet misdirection that day. She had a jaguar on a leash, but was carrying a garotte wire in that bracelet, and he was — well, it was Black Widow and — "

She pauses, then looks over at Steve for a moment, then shuts her mouth with a click. She has good teeth still. 

“And?” 

“They haven’t told you, have they?” Peggy looks at him for another moment. ”This my book of agents that I never caught. Most of them are dead now, but not all, and well, if they haven’t told you, I’m sorry.”

She looks out at the garden, and suddenly, strangely, she almost seems younger. It’s the fleeting emotion in her voice, the trace of it on her face. ”I’m very sorry.” 

When she looks back, though, it’s her usual voice, crisp, the usual way it sounds. She asks him to pour tea and starts asking about the ceremony in Stockholm. Steve tries, a few times, to ask her who the other person was, the dark-haired man working with Natasha in the old days, wearing the white tie dress and the glint of silver underneath the left cuff that could be a watch, could be —

Steve likes Peggy, doesn’t blame her for moving on from 1943, having a family, having a career, feels only the occasional ache at what could have been, especially when sitting in her beautiful garden and listening to her laugh about the Avengers, but sitting in her garden, talking to a woman just shy of a hundred years old who he remembers being a girl of twenty-seven, Nobel prize still in his pocket, Steve realizes very clearly how little he knows.


End file.
